Michelle Lovric
Showing posts with label Michelle Lovric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michelle Lovric. Show all posts

The Good Death II – Michelle Lovric

Five years ago I posted a piece about a fascinating and little-known Venetian scuola – The Company of Christ and the Good Death, the kind men who retrieved drowned bodies from the canals and provided funerals for those corpses who were not reclaimed by any family or friend.

On many afternoons, over many years, I’ve stood wistfully outside this 1644 building at San Marcuola and tried to imagine what it was like inside. It was always closed. Until I could see the interior for myself, I could not use it in my latest novel.

My interest was regenerated when I came across this strange painting at the tiny museum above Sant’Apollonia. It shows the Company at work, accompanying a corpse, dressed in extraordinary and rather terrifying costumes. (Apologies for the bad photograph, snatched against the rules.)

Then, on a recent Saturday afternoon, I limped off the vaporetto at San Marcuola. I was tired, full of notes that desperately needed transcribing (before even I myself would be unable to decipher my doctor’s-daughter scrawls). But, for some reason, instead of turning right towards home, I wandered off to the left. And so I came across the entrance of the scuola – not only open for the first time in my experience, but also bedecked with intriguing objects.

The scuola had been opened for a charity sale to support the parish.

The items for sale would be described in Italian as 'cianfrusaglie' - stuff/bits & pieces. A judgmental person might translate 'cianfrusaglie' as 'junk' or even 'frippery'. I am not that person.

You can guess how fast I scampered inside, and how earnestly I asked for permission to take photographs. Here they are.



Surely these are the processional lamps brandished by the Company in the painting above left?


The building’s interior appears greatly foreshortened – there are two rooms and a staircase behind the altar. Surely these steps (below) lead up to the chambers where the bodies were laid out and prepared for burial. What remained up there? I was shooed away from a full inspection when I dared to open the doors for this tantalizing glimpse.

Now my imagination needs to declutter the space and find my way to its original state, with at least three important paintings on the wall, the candle-holders arrayed with fragrant wax and disposed with dignity, men quietly praying.

I’m working on it.

Michelle Lovric's website 
Read More

Infamy again - Michelle Lovric

Venice is taking a small stand against all the Disneyfication, cruisification and forgetting of the last decade. A small piece of her history is … we hope … about to be restored to her: a column of infamy.

I have written previously of my own long campaign to restore this fascinating and important relic of Venice’s early modern history. Not many cities have seven hundredth anniversaries. But Venice has: that of the conspiracy of Baiamonte Tiepolo in 1310, an event that led to the formation of the game-changing Council of Ten, which ruled Venice for the next four-and-a-half centuries.

In my innocence, thought it would be an excellent idea to resurrect that column for the 2010 anniversary. Venice’s bureaucracy disagreed. Now, where I failed eight years ago, others have at last succeeded.

Almost. In two senses.

The restored column is a replica. It’s taken over five years to produce and get permission to put it in the campo of Sant’Agostin, the place where the original column stood as a warning to anyone else who might think of murdering the Doge and setting up a new kind of state.

The original column has not been lost. It still languishes in the ‘deposito lapidario’ of the Palazzo Ducale, and for reasons best known to themselves, the Venetian Musei Civici are keeping it down there. They have at last included the column in their online register of  works. Catalogue entry Cl. XXV n. 0984 includes two photographs. This is certainly an advance on the tragicomical vacuum of information I found when I was hunting for the column all those years ago.



Nor is the replica column returning to the site of the original. For years, that spot has been marked by a dirty, broken and hardly explicit stone slab (above), making it seem as if the city were ashamed of what it had – or what it had lost – in the column of infamy.

The replica column is to be placed closer to the centre of the campo, near the well-head.

the wellhead in Campo Sant'Agostin

This drawing shows how the column was damaged
by a supporter of Baiamonte Tiepolo some years after
the original conspiracy

Frustrated by lack of
access to the real column,
I commissioned this
atmospheric painting of it by
Kaitlin McDonough
The Soprintendenza dei Beni Culturali has finally approved the new sculpture. However, apart from that intervention, it appears that the re-erection of the column is an entirely citizen-generated and privately funded exercise.

Venice is indebted to Andrea Bizio Gradenigo and the Societa’ di Mutuo Soccorso Carpentieri e Calafati. The work has been executed by the sculptor Riccardo Gatti with the help of Lorenzo Gersich, a student at the liceo artistico at Santo Spirito. The project is sponsored by a travel agent, Albatravel. To celebrate properly, the campo of Sant’Agostin was to a full cleaning at the hands of the Associazione Masegni e Nizoleti. All credit to everyone involved. And the column was supposed to be put in place on the anniversary of the conspiracy, which famously took place on Saint Vito’s day, June 15th, in 1310. It would have made an enormous difference to those of us who care about Venetian history and the column to let that happen.

Unfortunately, to the very last minute, Venetian bureaucrats seem to have shown a Irish-style begrudgery towards this column that their indifference finally could not keep hidden. I should not have been surprised. Despite all the best-laid plans of the above-mentioned citizens, bureaucratic delays have meant that the replica has still not reached the Campo Sant-Agostin.

Added to the bureaucracratic imbroglio there was apparently a Comune architect or engineer who was poorly and some other functionary who went on holiday at a crucial moment. I'm sure I wish them a speedy recovery and a lovely break respectively.

For the last six months, I have been hoping to bring news of the column’s placement. And hoping. And waiting. And fuming.

Meanwhile … back at the London loft … Some time ago, in this place, I wrote a very emotional post about the demolition of a Victorian tier gate belonging to the charming building that was once ‘Mr Roots Horse Hospital’. Now known as Blows Yard, it nestles by London’s Borough Market. The unpunished amputation of the column was a clear sign to me, and many people who wrote in, that something is not well, conservation-wise, in the Borough of Southwark.

Ever since then, the site has been shrouded in hoarding. The hoarding has recently come off, revealing that the mate of the lamented column has also been done away with too.

Michelle Lovric's website
For those of you looking forward to Joan Lennon's latest piece, normally scheduled for the 5th of the month - she will post on the 10th, and this special post is well worth waiting for!


Read More

Cod fail - Michelle Lovric

I've done a lot of crazy things in cars on the terraferma of the Veneto. It always seems to go wrong. Some might say that I'm better off never leaving Venice. This post feels like a continuation of Not the Villa Pisani at Stra, in which your correspondent swotted up on said stately home only to be delivered to a completely different Villa Pisani.

This time I thought I'd done my homework properly. I'm currently on the trail of the historic trade route that brings dried cod from the Lofoten island of Røst all the way to Venice. I have written previously about the slightly salty start to the six-hundred-year-old relationship between the fishermen of Norway and the diners of la Serenissima. It started with a shipwreck in 1431 and the cod-lines have never been broken since then. But lately ‘stoccafisso’ or cod has become a talismanic plot device in my WIP. Venetian revolutionaries known as 'Carbonari' will use it when fermenting some trouble for their Austrian occupiers in 1818.

At any Venetian bar or restaurant, you can to this day eat Baccalà mantecato (dried Norwegian cod soaked in water or milk and then whipped up to a fluffy paste with olive oil). And of course it was the two islands of Røst and Venice that set up the whole unlikely business. Surprisingly, however, the mother-lode of modern stoccafisso research in the Veneto turns out to be on dry land.

In 1987, the Confraternità della Baccalà alla Vicentina (cod served with polenta) was established in the small terraferma town of Sandrigo, half an hour’s drive from Bassano del Grappa. A partnership brought together gastronomists and local personalities who resolved to promote the baccalà that was, they feared, in the process of disappearing from the Veneto.

Two years later, the plans came into effect. September 30 and October 1 of 1989 saw the arrival of the first stockfish from the Lofoten Islands to be cooked by restaurants and served to the public in a Saturday night supper and a Sunday lunch in Sanrigo. On Saturday afternoon those involved paraded around the town, which was bedecked with Norwegian flags, a sight said to have moved the Norwegian Ambassador, whose countrymen had donated 5 quintals of stockfish for the occasion. Sandrigo welcomed 10,000 visitors that weekend, too many to be fed the main meal. Many had to settle for a pasta seasoned with a "tocio" of baccalà. And for the last thirty years the tradition has continued, each year enriched with new activities and festivities. Innovative dishes have been added to the repertoire. Now you can get gnocchi and risotto with baccalà, croquettes with baccalà and many other dishes. There is even, God help us, baccalà pizza. According to the website, the baccalà festival is now one of the biggest and most important in Italy. In 2017 the 10,000 kg of the fish were consumed, a record.

Relations with the Norwegians have strengthened: thanks also to land-bound Sandrigo twinning with the island of Røst and to the ever-increasing presence of Nordic guests and students who, in alternate years, come to visit Sandrigo.

Given my current research, I was of course keen to see the festival of the baccalà. So to Sandrigo recently, in a day of limpid sunshine, hoping to catch sight of the promised processions, the handsome (surely!) Norwegian fisherman, to taste the many dishes prepared for the occasion and to generally enjoy the sagra. (A sagra is a festival usually devoted to a local food of some kind. As nothing much grows in Venice, except cruise ships and tourist inundations, we are deprived of sagre. So it was especially piquant to feel that I was about to get a little involved in this one.)

Naturally, I did my research on the website of the Confraternità. September 27th was listed as one of the active days of the festival. Personally, I was hoping to meet some Røstians whom I could visit next year when I do the Norwegian part of my research. I had a million questions for them.

My little party was encouraged when the first thing we saw in Sandrigo was a banner over the road, welcoming us to Baccalà Country.


 Then, with mounting excitement, we noted the Norwegian flags at every corner. At the excellent Sandrigo restaurant where we had lunch, wooden models of stoccafisso were piled in the window. We were told by our host that perhaps forty or fifty Norwegians were in town for the festival. He was curious too: ‘And why are you here, Signori?’

‘Siamo alla caccia di Pescatori Norvegesi’ we told our host. ‘We are on the hunt for Norwegian fishermen’. Under my breath, I added, ‘Tall, handsome ones!’

 But … on making our way to the sports ground which is the epicentre of the festa, we found only empty seats …


empty bars …

a huge pavilion set up for hundreds of dinners …

also totally empty …
 
The only person we saw in the whole realm of the cod was a solitary man on a bicycle.
 
 
As for Norwegians, not a one, except painted on windows of pizzeria.
(I am assuming that the tall one with the red beard is a Pescatore Norvegese).
 
also, the ones below with the Viking horns …
 

 We found the menus of all the different dishes prepared with cod …
 
and even a picture promising cod pizza.
 
 
 
But no cod, except these wooden ones at our restaurant:
 

It turns out that I was misinformed about the true excitements of the sagra. We should have committed ourselves properly to the cod and made a weekend of it.

We had already missed the previous Saturday’s show: TIRACCHE MATTE PRESENTS THE CRAZY GIRAFFE - a duo of jugglers grappling with the objects of everyday life. And Sunday’s Mediaeval Show with waders (?) and jesters.

Just two days after our visit, Saturday 29 September was to be one of the highlights, with pavilions of foods, tastings, and a Magic Night with street arts, including fakirs, tightrope walkers and fire-eaters, all accompanied by live music. And on the morning of Sunday, September 30th there’d be the Investiture ceremony of the Confraternità of the Baccalà in the presence of the Norwegian delegation from Rost, with flag-raising - national anthems and performances by the drummers of Conegliano Veneto and the flag-wavers of the Cerva di Noale, historical costumes, a parade of the Food and Wine Confraternities and of the Baccalà Club, followed by more live music and street shows. Monday 1 October was to be the GRAN FINALE, with the specialty of RISOTTO DI GRUMOLO DELLE ABADESSE … with baccalà. Since the 16th century, rice is a speciality of the small hamlet of Grumolo delle Abbadesse, between Vicenza and Padua. It was introduced to the area by nuns ('abbadesse') from the Benedictine abbey of San Pietro di Vicenza.

But by Monday October 1, I was long gone, sadly. I was back in London, having scored a comprehensive fail on my cod research. However, I do not count my golden day in Sandrigo as wasted. I could not have wished for more hilarious and sympathetic companions. I’d never been to Sandrigo before. We were shown inside the lovely Villa Sesso Bourdignan by its kind owners, who now live in the part of the building that was the original post office, being the home of the carrier pigeons who used to deliver the mail.

We also got to press our noses against the gates of this villa and glimpse its frescoes through a cracked keyhole.

Those of you who speak Italian, will know that its name translates as ‘Villa Sex Slave'. But in fact the ‘Sesso’ is a family name (We had earlier seen the villa of Camillo Sesso) and Schiavo is a locality. (Still!)

But sadly, now I am back in London, writing this. I’ll hope for better luck in Røst next June, where a Puffin Festival is promised … maybe … if I can get the day right … perhaps ...

Michelle Lovric's website
Read More

Not giving a pig’s patootie: an interview with Laurie Graham on the pitfalls and pleasures of reviving old characters - Michelle Lovric

Every novelist has her own personal history, her cast of characters that stretch way back into her writing past. Laurie Graham, a former History Girl, never dreamed of writing sequels to her two early novels, Perfect Meringues and The Future Homemakers of America. She thought that those characters were in their graves: gone, but fondly remembered.

But in recent years, she’s been asked to pick up the stories of Lizzie Partridge the 1990s TV chef from Perfect Meringues and Peggy Dewey the 1950s Airforce wife in Homemakers. In each case she’s moved the characters on twenty years from their last appearance.

Writing this way raises particular problems, not least that Laurie hadn’t thought to future-proof Lizzy and Peggy. She was left with a desire to go back and rewrite the originals, to make better starting points for sequels. But it can’t be done. What’s published is published.

 Another problem is being forced to re-read old work …

I have had the pleasure of interviewing Laurie about the art of revivifying old characters …

 How does it feel to reread your old novels?

Initially it was so painful that I kept putting it off for tomorrow. I had to force myself to sit down and do it and indeed I was horrified by some of what I read. I couldn’t believe that my old editors had let certain things go through. But there was a good side to revisiting old material: I discovered that I’m a better writer now than I was twenty years ago.

In what way?

I am more ruthless. I can now see in my early books instances of self-indulgence and sloppiness. With occasional downpours of clichés!

But all writers are desperately self-critical, aren’t they?

Not all, I fear. But we should be. Of course it’s a perennial tussle between having the confidence of your convictions while writing with the dreck-detector switched on.

 I know that where twenty years ago it might have broken my heart to cut things that really needed to go, now I don’t hesitate. If the voice in my head says ‘really, Laurie? Sure about that, are you?,’ it goes, immediately. Stuff can always be retrieved from the cutting-room floor but funnily enough, it never is.

So the new Lizzy Partridge book is just out. It’s called Anyone for Seconds?, which is a double pun, in that it is a second helping of an earlier novel’s protagonist?

Yes. And I very much hope that no reviewer is going to say ‘No, thank you. We’ve had our fill of that.’

Tell us about the original Lizzie – and the new one.

Laurie in 1998
What has been interesting for me is that when I created Lizzy I was going through a very difficult period of my life: divorce, single parenthood, penury. Quite coincidentally (or was it?), when reviving her, I was going through another difficult period: grief, loss, penury again. So Lizzie has been a sort of mouthpiece for me, the most autobiographical of my protagonists. In Perfect Meringues she was in her forties and the single parent of a stroppy teenager. In Anyone for Seconds she’s a grandmother, though not of the knitting and baking variety. She was sharp and funny then but she’s sharper and funnier now, having reached the golden years of not giving a pig’s patootie.

In Perfect Meringues she was a daytime TV cook who loses her slot to a one-recipe wonder who’s sleeping with the show’s editor. Lizzie bows out in the glorious blaze of an on-air food fight. When I dramatized the book for Radio 4 I had the great pleasure of scripting the fight for Imelda Staunton who played Lizzie and Lesley Joseph who played her nemesis, TV anchor Kim.

I was an enthusiastic cook myself in the 1990s so I enjoyed dreaming up menus for Lizzie. Wind on two decades and Lizzie, like me, rarely cooks. She’ll dine, as I have been known to do, on a slice toast eaten leaning over the sink. And her grungy, eye-rolling teenage daughter, has grown up, scrubbed up and become a career woman and a helicopter parent to her own son. Drawn from life? I name no names. Anyone for Seconds? is a work of fiction.
Laurie now
How did you work on this technically?

 Having forced myself to sit at the kitchen table to read the first book, I was relieved to find that it wasn’t so very bad. It actually made me laugh a couple of times, which was encouraging. Most important of all, I still liked Lizzie and her entourage. I was happy at the prospect of spending another year in their company.

 On that first reading, I foolishly didn’t make notes so during the writing of the sequel I had to keep going back to the old text. If only novels had indices.

My usual process with a novel is to wait for a voice but in this instance I already had the voice. What I needed to do next was a cull of characters. Who should reappear, who was for the chop? Lizzie’s mother, Muriel, now approaching 90, was a likely candidate for an early exit, but I found I couldn’t dispense with her. Muriel, just like my own dear departed Mum, is so key to understanding what drives Lizzie. So Muriel was spared and the guillotine fell elsewhere.

There’s always the question of a love interest. Lizzie had a happy romantic ending in Perfect Meringues, as did my own life about the time I was finishing writing the book. But ‘happy ever after’ often turns out to be ‘happy for the time being.’

I decided that should be Lizzie’s lot. Alone again, wiser, more resilient and, no longer actively looking for love as she was in her forties, she is, strange to relate, more likely to find it.

What are the main differences in society in the 20 years between the two books?

Only two decades and yet the world is hardly recognisable. When I wrote Perfect Meringues, I didn’t own a mobile phone. I just about had a computer, a beast which took up half of my small study. In the sequel, though Lizzie is way behind the technological curve even she has a mobile phone.

From the point of view of Lizzie’s character, political correctness is the most significant change in the world she inhabits. She, like me, finds it oppressive and at times risible, and she resists having her thoughts and speech policed by her vigilant daughter, Ellie. Each of them is a creature of their time. Ellie, born in the 1970s is as baffled by post-war baby Lizzie as Lizzie is by her own mother, born in the 1920s.

What was the hardest thing about reviving Lizzie?

This may sound odd but I think the thing that caused me most concern was how a sequel would be received. I didn’t want my readers to think I’d run out of new ideas. On the contrary, I still have plenty of ideas. Sadly my publishers haven’t been as enamoured of them as I am so they must lie dormant for the time being. I just didn’t want people to think I was scraping the authorial barrel. Let’s rather call it a bit of perfectly legitimate grave-robbing.

Laurie Graham website

Michelle Lovric website

at left, The Horrors of the London burial grounds, being a correct account of the horrible disclosures made by gravediggers : with the manner of cutting up dead bodies, and other horrible transactions, 1840, courtesy of Wellcome Images 
Read More

Signs of life - Michelle Lovric

People often ask me how the diminishing population of native Venetians feels about the tourist hordes that dominate her more obvious streets. (Real Venetians go ‘through the linings’, as their saying goes, knowing routes the crowds never find).

Salvatore Settis has written of the danger of Venice becoming a ‘servile monoculture’ of tourism. ‘Servile’ is an insult no Venetian would easily accept. So when I see irascible or emotional signs put up by Venetians, I take them as a proof of life. They demonstrate that Venetians have not given up on their city, care about one another and will vigorously defend her against the ‘maleducati’ – the vulgar masses, who dump their rubbish on Venetian doorsteps or use her quiet corners as urinals and worse. Years ago, I translated a set of Venetian proverbs that had never before been rendered in English. One that applies here seems to be: Dio ha mandà l’om per castigar l’om. God created man to shame man. And Venetians create signs to shame those who shame their city with unsanitary and inconsiderate behaviour. They also create signs about things close to their hearts.

Those of delicate dispositions are advised to leave off reading here, as I’m afraid there is scatology to come. Honest, angry scatology, that there’s no prettying up.

 This Venetian sign is probably my favourite, because of the language. It translates as ‘This place is the depository for rubbish and other materials – only for the vulgar, the uncivil, the ignorant, the cuckolds, the yokels, the bumpkins, the dirty, the ugly, those who stink, whose relatives are dead dogs.’ One of the things I loved about this one is that it shows Venice’s quintessential maritime-metropolitan disdain for those who come from terrafirma. Or, as the proverbs say,

Sete ciape tre cui e mezo.
Seven buttocks, three arseholes and a half: Venetian description of a typical land-dweller.

This one at right, with its porcupinery of exclamation marks, recently appeared in my own little campo. It says, ‘From the telecameras I have seen who you are!!! Don’t come to this door or this corner to defecate or urinate!! Videos of you are in police hands!!! Every urination and defecation will be recorded!!!!!

Which recalls this old Venetian proverb …
L'ànema a Dio, el corpo a la tera,
e 'l bus del cul al diavolo per tabachiera
The soul goes to God, the body to the Earth
and the arsehole to the devil, for his snuffbox.

Or this one:
El tempo, el culo e i siori
i fa quel i vol lori
Time, arses, and lords
do whatever they want

 In a ‘lively’ way, the one below invites ‘I Signori Passanti’ – the Gentle Misters Passers-By – not to leave their rubbish here. In fact, it also asks other residents to desist from the practice. This place, it concludes, is not a rubbish bin (with a drawing of the same).



As the proverb goes,
 El mondo no te dise vaca,
co no ghe xe qualche taca
The world doesn't point a finger at you,
if you haven't done something wrong.

At right, ‘Mr Citizen out on a walk’ is asked not to let his dog perform its ‘little needs’ in the entrance of the restaurant. Thanks to Rosato Frassanito for this sign.

The one below is sadder. A lost dog is always sad. When he is 15 years old, and obviously very much loved, it is even sadder. His owner thanks ‘from his heart’ and offers a reward of 200 euros to anyone who can help him find Zizzul, a medium-sized German shepherd type.


This sweet-faced dog was last seen on March 3 near the Stazione Marittima. I so hope he’s found.
In honour of Zizzul:

Loda el mar e tiente a la tera,
loda el monte e tiente al pian,
loda el gato, e tiente al can.
Praise the sea but stay on the land,
Praise the mountains but stay in the valley,
Praise the cat but stroke the dog.


This last one clearly contained an imprecation against dog owners that so angry-making as to make one canine-proprietor to clutch a handful of the paper and rake it off the wall.

As the proverb goes,
La lingua no ga osso ma la rompe i ossi.
The tongue doesn't have bones, but it breaks bones.


Michelle Lovric's website
Read More
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)